About 80% through “Sudden Death” the author, Álvaro Enrigue, admits he does not know what his book is about. He just knows he was mad. Mad because in every game the bad guys have the advantage.

This too, is probably not true.

He does tell you it isn’t a book about Caravaggio or Vasco de Quiroga; Cortés or Cuauhtémoc; or Galileo or Pius I; although they are all characters. The book is not about the birth of tennis, although Caravaggio and Quiroga are engaged in a duel by tennis, the reason for which they were both to drunk to remember. It is not about the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent, or Carlo Borromeo, although the period of the novel is a bookend that squeezes the life out of the Renaissance. It is not about the ironic use of Thomas More’s Utopia by the conquistadors in New Spain.

It ends with art maybe being the salvation of history. The ending, maybe the only weak part of the book in my view.

The inspiration for the novel was the exhibit at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, “El vuelo de las imágenes. Arte plumario en México y Europa 1300 – 1700” [Images take flight: feather art in Mexico and Europe]. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPZxD9D84ZI

This novel is a work of incredible imagination. Scalped hair is substituted for feathers in the composition of the tennis ball. It is made from the hair of the beautiful, but unlucky, bride of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The scapular worn by Cortés and ultimately by Quiroga in his tennis match, was cut from the hair of the emperor Cuauhtémoc after Cortés had him killed.

The author dedicates the book to La Flaca Luiselli. This is likely intended affectionately to his wife, the author Valerie Luiselli, the other half of this esteemed Mexican literary couple. I previously reviewed her experimental novel “The Story of My Teeth”, a collaboration with factory workers.

Carlos Fuentes, who I think writes some of the best first paragraphs in modern fiction, has an apt description of “Sudden Death”.

“Enrigue belongs to many literary traditions at once and shows a great mastery of them all… His novel belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

The novel is part art criticism of Caravaggio’s paintings. Some real, some imagined. “Caravaggio was to painting what Galilei was to physics: someone who took a second look and said what he was seeing, someone who discovered that forms in space aren’t allegories of anything but themselves, and that’s enough; someone who understood that the true mystery of the forces that control how we inhabit the earth is not how lofty they are, but how elemental.”

This novel is a whimsical romp through late Renaissance political, art, Catholic, and social history with a tour through Spain’s vanquishing of the Aztec empire in Mexico. They are equally bad guys to the author.

The chapter “Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor” is about Cardinal Montalto.

“… Montalto also spent those years planning how the city would look it really was the center of the world- a plan he executed with violence and perfectionism once he was named Pope Sextus V. He invented urbanism, though his name wasn’t Urban. It goes without saying that he never played pallacorda. The fact that no subsequent pope was called Sixtus after Montalto, who was the fifth, is proof that the Catholic Church is an institution without a sense of humor.”

The novel was awarded the Herralde Prize in Spain and the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico. Forget get the awards. If you admire good con- artistry and illusion you should read this book. It is fun, entertaining and educational in the same time and space.

“As with any story, this one begins with the Beginning; and then comes the Middle, and then the End. The rest, as a friend of mine always says, is literature: hyperbolics, parabolics, circulars, allegorics, and elliptics. I don’t know what comes after that. Possibly ignominy, death, and finally, postmortem fame.”

Valeria Luiselli’s creative novella “The Story of My Teeth” is the imagined biography of the self-described world’s best auctioneer, the memorable Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, otherwise known as Highway.

“I explained that what I meant was that I could tell stories whose degree of deviation from the value of the conic section of their related objects was greater than zero. In other words, as the great Quintilian had once said, by means of my hyberbolics, I could restore an objects value through ‘an elegant surpassing of the truth.’ This meant that the stories I would tell about the lots would all be based on facts that were, occasionally, exaggerated or, to put it another way, better illuminated.

It is unclear why Ms. Luiselli had this novella translated into English by Christina MacSweeney. I saw her read from this novella at the Brooklyn Book Fair this past Fall and she seems to be fluent in English. Ms. MacSweeney adds a timeline at the conclusion of the English version of the novella. It is as tongue-and-cheek as the novella. It places Highway within a historic chronology of obscure events. It may add some insight into the creation of the story because it references the auction of Marilyn Monroe’s and Winston Churchill’s teeth.

The novella is the biography of Highway as reflected through the history of his teeth. The Afterward conveys the back-story about the author’s development of the novella- a collaboration between the author and workers at a juice factory in Mexico. In part, the novella is an homage to tobacco readers that existed in Cuban cigar factories in mid- 19th Century. The chronology, like the book, is having some fun with the reader, as it publicizes the works of fellow Latin American writers/poets (and friends) such as Guadalupe Nettel, Paula Abramo, Alejandro Zambra, and many others. The book also has a small photographic gallery of venues in the novella, with accompanying quotations of various writers.

Ms. Luiselli, unlike many authors, understood that at a book reading it is essential to entertain. Greater prose can fall flat when read. She selected from this novella’s Parabolics chapter the description of the “tent effect”: the pyramid that aroused men create with a blanket or sheet when awaking in the morning.

Johnny Cash’s “Highwayman” was a survivor and so is Highway. He is not a con man, he is a story-teller, creating value from nothing. A priest asks him to raise money for the church from its senile congregation. Highway auctions each tooth in his mouth, ascribing the tooth to notables in history, philosophy, literature and art. He ascribes life lessons to teachings of his relatives such as Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. He is a good person and is taken advantage of by his son Siddhartha. A friend El Perro (also the name of a literary magazine) remains loyal to him. “Since then, I’ve always thought that hell is the people you one day become.” Highway does not change; finding beauty in everything. He gives value through his stories.

The book is funny and at times absurd. The weakest chapter is Allegorics. It seems to be the chapter that the workers collaborated on.

I was looking forward to reading this novella and was not disappointed. It is a different form of a novel- almost performance art. Her earlier novel, Faces in the Crowd was well received. She is an author worth paying attention to.

I was very pleased with the books I read this year. I failed to read a science fiction novel as I intended, but I read fantasy (“Bathing the Lion”) and a dystopian novel (“The “Bone Clocks”). I read a fair number of foreign authors and novels based in foreign countries. The description of the book below will tell you its locale.

MY FAVORITE BOOK FOR 2015: “Lila” by Marilynne Robinson. I was surprised that it was not Short-Listed for the Man Booker Prize. It juxtaposes spirituality and religious beliefs.

MY FAVORITE SHORT STORY COLLECTION: “Night at the Fiestas” by Kirstin Valdes Quade. A great new voice. Edith Pearlman’s “Honeydew” was also excellent, but it is expected of her. Same with Colum McCann’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking”.

MOST ORIGINAL BOOK: “The Book of Duels” by Michael Garriga. A collection of micro stories. What “Hamilton” is to theatre, this might be to short story writing. Very creative. Honorable Mention: “Orfeo” by Richard Powers.

MY FAVORITE FIRST PARAGRAPH: I love first paragraphs. The great Margaret Atwood wrote a beautiful one in her title story “Stone Mattress”.

DISAPPOINTMENTS:

“Amnesia” by Peter Carey. This seems to have been an experiment by an otherwise gifted writer.

“Memories of Melancholy Whores” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Maybe a long night drinking or just getting old. Rather disturbing.

“The Body Where I Was Born” by Guadalupe Nettel. It was favorably received but it did not resonate with me.

JANUARY

Tinkers by Paul Harding. Locale: U.S. Published by Bellevue Literary Press.

The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie. Locale: Germany and Arctic Canada. Published by Tin House in the U.S.

The King by Khader Abdolah. Locale: Persia. Published by New Directions. Translated from Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier.

FEBRUARY

The Man Who Walked Away by Maud Casey. Locale: France. Published by Bloomsbury. Historical Fiction.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. Locale: Malaysia. Published by Weinstein Books. Long-Listed for the Man Booker Prize. Historical Fiction.

The Book of Duels by Michael Garriga (micro-short stories). Locale: U.S. Published by Milkweed Editions. Historical Fiction. Inventive.

MARCH

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen. Locale:Poland (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Published by Riverhead Books. Historical Fiction. His last book.

The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath. U.S. author. Locale: U.S. Published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Redeploymentby Phil Klay. U.S. author. Locale: Iraq and Afghanistan. Published by Penguin Press. National Book Award.

MAY

The Bone Clocksby David Mitchell. British author. Locale: Dystopian fantasy based in England and Switzerland. Published by Random House. Long-Listed for the Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the World Fantasy Award.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. U.S. author. Locale: U.S. Published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam. Winner of Pen/Faulkner Award and short-listed for Man Booker Prize.

The Stone Woman by Tariq Ali. British Pakistani author. Locale: Ottoman Empire. Published by Verso.

AUTHORS

Khader Abdolah- Persian-Dutch author. This is his pen-name. His legal name is Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani. His pen name is a composition of the names of two of his friends who were executed.

Tariq Ali- British Pakistani author, journalist and filmmaker.

Margaret Atwood-Canadian author. The incomparable writer of dark tales of fantasy and horror and a treasure of the Northland. Short-listed for the Man Booker, winner of Arthur C. Clarke Award. Also a poet and literary critic.

Peter Matthiessen-U.S. author. Co-founder of The Paris Review and 3 time National Book Award recipient for fiction and non-fiction.

Colum McCann- Irish author.

David Mitchell- British author. Twice short-listed for Man Booker Prize.

Guadalupe Nettel- Mexican author.

Edith Pearlman- U.S. author of short stories. Winner of National Book Circle Critics Award, PEN/Malamud Award, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize.

Sylvia Plath- U.S. poet and novelist.

Peter Pouncey- U.S. author.

Richard Powers- U.S. author. National Book Award recipient that writes creative fiction about science and technology.

Kirstin Valdez Quade- U.S. author. Recipient of National Book Foundation “5 under 35” award.

Edgard Telles Ribeiro-Brazilian author and diplomat.

Marilynne Robinson- U.S. author. Pulitzer Prize, Orange Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award recipient and nominee for National Book Award and Man Booker Prize. Lila is part of an awarded trilogy with Gilead and Home.

I don’t know if is still a feature at Yankee Stadium, but statisticians ran amuck when you attended a baseball game. It became a source of humor with my son to look at the scoreboard to see the latest announcement about how well a player was doing. It wasn’t as if the players did not have legitimate records, but there seemed to be a need to embellish. If a player’s batting average for the season was .225, the scoreboard would announce that he was hitting .425 since the beginning of the month, even if it only started a week ago.

With this in mind I read on the back jacket the biography of Guadalupe Nettel, the author of “The Body Where I Was Born”. Ms. Nettel has received a number of prizes for Spanish literature and her first book in English Natural Histories was well received by the New York Times. What made me laugh was that she was designated a Granta “Best Untranslated Writer”. Granta’s description of the series is understandable: established writers select and showcase fellow writers from their own language who are not yet widely translated or read. Nonetheless, the designation makes me think of the sound a tree makes when it falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it. I am interested in knowing who the “Worst Untranslated Writer” is.

In any event, hopefully this novella is not representative of this “new” Mexican writer’s body of work. The plot description on the book jacket is “that from a psychoanalyst’s couch the narrator looks back on her childhood”. Except for intermittent one line rhetorical questions to the doctor, the reader would not discern that this is other than a memoir or diary. It is a monologue, where the psychoanalysis seems contrived.

The young girl has a deformity in one of her eyes, although this is only a concern raised at the beginning and end of the book. The book otherwise traces the life of a Mexican child of presumably middle class background, who has a dysfunctional family principally composed of a mother who likely did not want the obligation of a child and leaves the young girl with her strict grandmother and a father who is loving but away avoiding capture or in jail. The child suffers from some neurosis (with an allusion to Kafka), but survives, living for a time with her mother in a rough neighborhood in the south of France. There is nothing dramatic or incisive about the story or the prose. I don’t think it would interest a young adult as a coming of age novel, but I might be wrong. On rare occasion, there is some humor.

“I remember so well the time the math teacher, a woman with pronounced lordosis, while teaching us the x-axis and y-axis declared that her own posture was perpendicular to the floor. Camila burst into a loud and contagious laugh. ‘Miss!’ she blurted, ‘how can you say that? Have you looked in the mirror?'”

Reading Ignacio Padilla’s “Shadow Without A Name” is like walking through a labyrinth or a carnival’s hall of mirrors. The pathways and reflections seem real, but the images and identities are contrived and falsified. This is the Mexican author’s first novel translated into English. The core of the mystery is the Amphitryon Project of Nazi General Thadeus Dreyer, the purpose of which was to train doubles to pose as Nazi leaders for security reasons. Chess links all the impersonators and ultimately raises the question whether the Adolf Eichmann hung by the Israeli’s was the master chess player and author of the Final Solution or a double.

The author is not seriously questioning the identity of Eichmann, but is playing a literary game of chess imaginatively swapping pieces and trading pawns for queens. At times a scorecard is needed to keep track of who each character is because they assume different names throughout the novel. How Mr. Padilla decided on this plot is to me the great mystery. I have taken the story at face value- a game with gambits-and have not tried to ascribe to it a psychological theme about self and identity. It is more fun and suspenseful if left as an intriguing puzzle.

This is not to say that the author did not envision deeper meaning to the tale. It begins with a quote from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who wrote under heteronyms:

“I feel I am no one, only a shadow
Of a terrifying face I cannot see
And like the icy dark I exist nowhere.”

Whether this work is an homage to Pessoa is unclear, although there are four narrators, not all of whose names and characters reflect who they are. Identity is at the heart of the Greek myth Amphitryon, who accidentally kills his father and who plays the cuckhold husband to his wife Alcmene, who gave birth to two sons, one of which, Heracles, was the son of Zeus. The latter has been cast in comedic plays from Plautus to Heinrich von Kleist. John Banville who translated the latter’s work, also used it as the base for his novel “The Infinities”. Von Kleist’s works were ironically popular with the Nazi’s as they were with nationalistic Germans during World War I. The interesting twist on this is that his descendents, Ewald von Kleist and his son Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, were anti-Nazi. The latter was the last survivor of Operation Valkerie, the failed assination plot to kill Hitler. Whether the author knew this I don’t know, but it would not surprise me.

In February I reviewed Carlos Fuentes’ “The Death of Artemio Cruz”. Like that novel, “The Years with Laura Diaz” traverses the years surrounding the Mexican revolution, and class in Mexican society. Some of the secondary characters in that the earlier novel make cameo appearances in this novel, but the scope of “The Years with Laura Diaz” encompasses the major political travails of the 20th Century from a upper class socialist viewpoint. The Acknowledgment to the novel makes clear that this is fiction drawn from the author’s extended family.

There is a bit of name dropping in this novel, as it descriptive of the personalities of significant Mexican authors, artists, musicians, politicians and social diletantes of the period. The novel begins in 1999 Detroit. The City is on its knees and the focus of the visiting cinemaphotographer is coincidentally Diego Rivera’s mural at The Detroit Institute of Arts. It is the same mural that the now bankrupt Detroit considered selling this year. The Marxist Diego Rivera was commissioned by the bigot Henry Ford. Biting the benefactor’s hand, Rivera celebrates revolutionary workers of all colors. Rivera subsequently did the same at Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller, unlike Ford, had it painted over. Within the Detroit mural there is a woman. Not Rivera’s companion artist, Frida Kahlo, but an ancestor of the cinemaphotographer, Laura Diaz.

Octovio Paz had a long-standing feud with Carlos Fuentes because his magazine published an article by Enrique Krauze that dubbed Fuentes a “guerrilla dandy”. This novel may lend support to that view. Laura Diaz is the product of the Mexican upper echelon of the middle class. The novel examines socio-political changes through the attractive Ms. Diaz’s failed marriage and numerous affairs. Though she has means, they are not independent means. Her relationships are the source of her financial support. Although at times she is characterized as victim, she is self-absorbed. Not until the near end of her life does she fulfill any responsibilities. She is a celebrated free-spirit in search of herself. She is critical of her husband, who is mid-level labor leader that rose from poverty through the revolution. He “sells out” in her mind because she had an upper class image of revolution. The poor don’t want to be poor. He supports her in the style of her class.

Mr. Fuentes is cynical about politicians, particularly Mexican politicians. He parades upper class societal functions, but appears comfortable with them. The novel does not delve into the pervasive under-class. It does not want their point of view. Laura Diaz is shown this class once by her husband. She is glad to not see how they live more than once. She does not return and neither does the novel.

Like “The Death of Artemio Cruz” the novel is strongest when it is descriptive of Mexico’s regions, cooking, vegetation, dancing and culture. The novel can be philosophical. This adds depth to the writing. The chapter about expats during the U.S.’ McCarthy era is however a bit repetitive.

The novel slows toward the end although it is chronologically circular. It would have been better served by more editing. The book is worth reading, but I preferred “The Death of Artemio Cruz”.

Carlos Fuentes wrote his celebrated novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz” before The Who wrote “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” He dedicated the book to C. Wright Mills, the sociologist author of “The Power Elite”. The son of a diplomat, and a diplomat himself, Fuentes’ socialist politics was developed from privilege. There is a cynicism to this work born from realism about Latin American politicians and institutions.

The story is told through the death-bed memories that diary Artemio Cruz’s life from impoverishment to patrician. A revolutionary who is metamorphosed to manipulating elite. A life stage and not a mutation, the powerful and powerless, the rich and the poor, are the same. It is a transposition of power and wealth, not of beliefs.

Artemio Cruz is not caricature of egoism or megalomania. He is a complex character whose materialism and power is real. He is not evil, if indifference is not evil. Power is ceded or taken from the weak. He plays or manipulates to his advantage. What is lost, is his gain. He despises the sycophants. A scene at his New Year’s Eve party (the feast of St. Sylvester) at the enormous residence he keeps for his young but aging mistress is price-less. The dialogue is of overheard one-line remarks of his rich guests who believe he is too old to hear. It is a ploy Mr. Fuentes uses throughout the novel, to draw the other characters and their relationship to Mr. Cruz.

Artemio Cruz’s character is fully drawn; as in life, personalities are carved from loss. Mr. Cruz’s loss is love: his first love, and the loss of his son. The latter, although in volume a small portion of the novel, is the essence of this fatalistic story.

The novel is also about Mexico. It is both a historical review and a sociological study.

” Take your Mexico: take your inheritance.

You will inherit the sweet, disinterested faces with no future because they do everything today, say everything today, are present and exist in the present. They say ‘tomorrow’ because tomorrow doesn’t matter to them. You will be the future without being it; you will consume yourself today thinking about tomorrow. They will be tomorrow because they live only today.”

Stylistically, Mr. Fuentes writing is not what I would normally prefer. It is voluble with adjectives; recursive with synonyms; and the flashbacks slowly secrete the relevance of new characters. Nonetheless, I am captivated by his writing and would read this book again. I can’t help feeling that there is something I missed, because there is depth to his writing. The latter I noticed when reading the first lines of other books that he has written. I intend to read these other novels. I suggest you read this novel. It is great literature.